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Alan Turing inspired a faster way to make seawater drinkable

By Andy Coghlan

MORE than 300 million people depend on drinking water extracted from the sea, but the desalination process is often inefficient. Now an idea that computing pioneer Alan Turing had nearly 70 years ago is being used to speed it up.

Two basic desalination methods exist: boiling sea water to make water vapour for collection, or pumping it through membranes that extract salt. With membranes, though, there is a trade-off between the flow rate and how much salt they capture.

Inspired by Turing’s only paper on chemistry, Lin Zhang at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and his colleagues …